HUNTER (The Corbin Brothers Book 1) Read online

  HUNTER

  Corbin Brothers, Book 1

  L E X I E R A Y

  Copyright © 2016

  All Rights Reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Epilogue

  Chapter 1

  “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  I didn’t have to glance up to know just who was in the middle of judging me mightily. Chance was like a mother hen and a brutally exacting father figure all wrapped into one. I supposed it came with the territory of being the oldest brother, but there was no way to know for certain. I was the runt of this family.

  “What does it look like I’m doing?” I drawled, popping the cap off my beer on the edge of the chipped countertop, the suds foaming dangerously near the top of the bottle. I rolled the cocktail of pills around in my closed fist like dice before tossing them in the back of my mouth and washing them down with the fresh beer. There was nothing as good as a beer when it was first opened, all full of sparkle and promise and life. And there was nothing as bad as a beer in its last swallow, that promise expired and the need to go find some other form of reassurance lurking.

  “Well, to me, it looks like you just gobbled down a handful of pills and are planning on adding a beer to the mix.” My brother’s blue eyes did their best to cut me in two. “It’s not even ten o’clock in the goddamn morning, Hunter. What has gotten into you?”

  I laughed at that. I laughed at the idea that he might not actually know what had gotten into me, or out of me, or off of me. I laughed at the fact that this wasn’t even my first beer, nor would it be my last.

  “I know what time it is,” I said, leaning against the countertop, taking an insolent swig from the bottle. “Before five o’clock, it’s beer time. After five o’clock, it’s whiskey time.”

  “I don’t understand why you think this is funny,” Chance said, crossing his arms over his chest. “This is your life, you know.”

  “I know it’s my life, you sanctimonious son of a bitch,” I said, lurching toward him in such a blind anger that I nearly spilled my beer. My crutch clattered to the ground with a nasty racket. “Don’t you think I know? I wish it were any other life, but it’s mine.”

  Chance studied the crutch and sighed, moving to stoop down and retrieve it, but I shoved him back, away from it.

  “Don’t pity me,” I growled. “Think whatever you want, but don’t you dare pity me.”

  “You’re making it awfully hard not to, Hunter.”

  I’d dropped the crutch before. Hell, I dropped it every time I sunk into a seat or into my bed, and then I retrieved it the next time I wanted to get up and hobble around. But it was different dropping it in front of my oldest brother, drunker than I meant to be at this time of the morning. I knew he saw me as weak—weak in mind, body, and spirit—and losing control of the thing that helped me walk around the house was just the latest piece of evidence he was sure to file away in his brain to bring up at a later date, like, “Hey, Hunter, remember the time you were standing in the kitchen mixing pills and alcohol and got so messed up you couldn’t even hold onto your damn crutch?”

  Or something.

  Chance was a lot of things, but petty wasn’t one of them. I knew his concern was about as real as my self-loathing, but the ten-year age difference between us made it difficult for us to relate to each other.

  Well, a ten-year age difference and thousands of miles.

  And a lot of things I wasn’t about to get into.

  Using the countertop and the cabinets below it as handholds, I bent to collect my crutch—and what little remained of my dignity—and popped up quickly to prove to my brother I wasn’t as weak as he thought I was. But it was too quick. My head swam, and I lost my balance for the briefest of moments before Chance seized me by my arms and kept me upright.

  “Are you drunk right now?” he growled, right in my face. “I ought to let you fall right on your sorry ass.”

  “Do what you like,” I said tiredly, the fight gone out of me just as suddenly as it had entered. I could barely keep my eyelids up, and I couldn’t tell if it was the pills I’d swallowed, or the line of beers that had marched right down my throat and into my belly, or the fact that I’d been drinking since midnight last night, unable to sleep a single wink.

  “Um, guys?”

  My brother let go of me, and I had to focus to lean on the crutch in order to balance myself. It was so foreign, relying on a length of aluminum and rubber to keep me standing. Would it ever become second nature, as simple as remembering how to ride a bicycle? Part of me hoped it never would, that I’d never get used to being half a man.

  “What is it, Avery?” Chance barked, making our brother flinch and scowl. “Sorry.”

  “We’re all here, out in the front room,” Avery said. “Like you asked.”

  “Thanks,” Chance said, combing a hand through his curly, sand-colored hair. He’d have been a dead ringer for Dad, but for that hair. That hair was all Mom’s.

  “What, are we having a party?” I asked dully. If so, I’d make my retreat. I hated when people came calling to the house, pretending to visit to see how I was doing and staying on to stare at me as if I was some kind of side-show attraction. It was invasive, and I’d taken to all but living in my bedroom because of all the “well-wishers.” I knew they didn’t really wish me well. They just wanted to ogle the thing I was missing.

  “Family meeting,” Chance said briskly. “Let’s go.”

  I didn’t have any choice but to follow my brothers into the front room of the house. It was the room for receiving guests, to make polite small talk with strangers, and not one for families, but it was also the only place that had enough furniture to seat all of us comfortably.

  I recoiled on principle at seeing the room full of people, blood relatives be damned. There were five of us, myself included, and us Corbin boys commanded something of a presence. There wasn’t a single one of us who could be defined as small for his age, and a popular joke used to be what a female sibling of ours would look like. Our hair color ranged from palest blond—me, though I kept it buzzed too short for anyone to tell the exact color—to the golden brown of Emmett’s ridiculous topknot. Everyone else—Avery, Tucker, and Chance—fell on some point of the spectrum. For a whole decade, our parents had machine-gunned boys into existence for the sole purpose of being ranch hands. They hadn’t taken much of a break between any of us, and I wondered if they ever would’ve stopped having children if they hadn’t been killed in that car wreck. I’d just been eight years old—a whole lifetime ago. Having all the family together seemed as real as a vaguely memorable dream from many nights ago.

  It was odd to see all of my brothers in one place. The ranch was huge, and everyone should’ve been scattered across it for hours by now. Odder still was that this was a prime day for work, from what I could tell with the sunlight streaming in through the windows. I hadn’t set foot outside since I’d gotten here. I told myself it was to avoid pitfalls like holes and clods and tree roots that would make me stumble, but I knew the real reason. I didn’t want to see people, and I didn’t want to be seen.

  Family m
eetings were also odd, though not unheard of. For us, though, they were usually handled by group text messages, making the directives usually easy to ignore. The fact that we were all here, instead of doing work that otherwise wouldn’t get accomplished, meant something truly serious was at stake.

  “Someone shove over for Hunter,” Chance said, crossing his arms and leaning on the entranceway to the room. That made it clear that he was going to stand for the duration of whatever he had to say to all of us—insufferable. He’d lorded his age over us for our entire lives, even when our parents were still alive and in charge of this place.

  Tucker caught my eye and pounded the couch cushion next to him good-naturedly. Even if he was the second-oldest brother of the family, and nine years my senior, I felt closer to him than I did anyone else. He understood things that no one else did. When I’d woken up shouting, one of those early nights before all the stitches had even been removed, I’d found him sitting on the foot of my bed, staring at nothing, just waiting for me to come back to myself.

  “I can’t pretend I know everything about what you’ve been through,” he said, his voice low, “but, brother, I’ve seen enough to think that maybe I get it. Talk to me if you ever feel like talking.”

  But there was nothing in the world that would get me to talk about the things I saw inside of my own head late at night. They’d lock me up and throw away the key.

  “Dammit, Tuck,” Avery complained, coughing, long limbs draped over an armchair beside the couch as a cloud of dust rose from the cushion. “My outdoor allergies are enough to deal with without having to suck in a lungful of dust inside.”

  “Poor princess,” Tucker simpered at him. “Well, when’s the last time anyone cleaned in here? Washed the cushion covers? Vacuumed underneath them?”

  “We would probably strike oil if anyone cared to peel one of those things up and see what’s under there,” Emmett quipped, making the old rocking chair creak with every back-and-forth movement he made. “Keep your fingers crossed. Oil would be good for this place.”

  “Oil would be terrible for the ranch,” Chance cut in, “and that’s not why we’re here.”

  The rest of us were compelled to pay attention to our oldest brother, framed in the doorway like some kind of preacher or something. I took a long pull on my beer, wishing I’d had the foresight to bring in five or six more to get me through this painstaking show of idiocy. Tucker frowned at me, as if he’d only seen the beer I clutched for the first time, but I paid him no mind.

  “You all know how hard it is to maintain the ranch,” Chance continued. “You all work hard—most of you. But we’re really going to have to pull off some kind of miracle to keep everything running.”

  “You say this every year,” Avery said, rolling his eyes. “And every year, we do come up with whatever miracle you require. What’s so different about this year?”

  “This year, we’re behind,” Chance said calmly, even as his blue eyes burned into Avery. It was nice to have that eviscerating gaze directed at someone else. “We had to take the loan out last year, if you’ll remember, and it’s still not paid back. With the drought, I don’t know if it’ll ever be paid back.”

  “That’s why we should diversify—” Emmett began eagerly, but Chance cut him off with a single glare.

  “Do you really want to have that discussion again?” Chance demanded quietly with venom in his voice. “Don’t you remember what we said?”

  Emmett heaved a sigh, and I almost felt sorry for him. “That diversifying will take too much capital up front. That we don’t have that kind of capital to spend on a fool’s errand. Blah, blah, blah.”

  “Well, we don’t, and that’s the end of it,” Chance said. “If you stumble upon a buried treasure or leprechaun’s gold while out working the ranch, then we could consider paying back the loan, fixing up the house, hiring some more help out here, and then your pipe dreams. See where you are on that list?”

  “I see it,” Emmett said, sullen.

  “We’re especially behind this year, and it’s not all due to the loan and the weather,” Chance said, looking down briefly before looking back up at me.

  I narrowed my eyes at him before taking another defiant chug of my beer. Everyone gradually followed Chance’s gaze, and I had to almost physically restrain myself from squirming. I didn’t like all those eyes on me, even if they did belong to my brothers. I didn’t like being noticed like this, called out.

  “What’s that supposed to mean, big brother?” I asked, trying to sound cavalier. Instead, I slurred and felt Tucker wince beside me. What was his problem? What was Chance’s problem? What was everyone’s problem?

  “It means that, for the sake of us being up front with one another, you’re not pulling your weight around here, Hunter,” Chance said. I’d give him one thing. It looked like it gave him zero pleasure to say that, his shoulders slumped, hands jammed tightly in his jean pockets.

  “Come on, man,” Tucker rumbled.

  “I’ve tried to be sensitive,” Chance countered. “But Hunter’s been here with us for four months, and he hasn’t left the house, let alone met with his counselors at the VA hospital, physical therapists, prosthesis-fitting appointments …”

  “Don’t talk about me like I’m not even here,” I spat, rage cutting through the fog of pills and alcohol. “You don’t even know anything.”

  “What I do know is that, sometimes, you’re not even here,” he said. “You eat pills like candy; you drink booze like it’s a magic potion or something that’s going to grow your leg back for you—”

  “Easy on the baby, Chance,” Tucker warned, and I recognize it for what it was—a mimic, whether my brother realized it or not, of our Mom’s most-uttered phrase. She used it to combat horseplay and teasing and discipline and work assignments. I knew those words intimately, even if the memory of what her voice had sounded like, its pitch and timber and cadence, faded long ago.

  “He fought for our freedom,” Avery offered.

  “Spare me that bullshit,” I said, rounding on the brother closest to my own age but still so clueless, my anger a caged bear, spinning, not knowing where to lash out.

  “You’re out of control,” Chase said, drawing my attention back to him, helping me to hone my ire on one target. “You’re not looking to get any better. And if I’m being honest, you’re becoming a burden to both this ranch and this family.”

  “Fuck you,” I retorted, hell-bent on hiding my hurt with fury, lurching into a standing position. My beer bottle tumbled to the floor and shattered on impact, but it didn’t matter. It was almost empty.

  “For Christ’s sake, Hunter,” Emmett said, kicking at the pile of glass at his feet. “Look at yourself. You’re a mess.”

  “Can this be your wakeup call?” Avery added. “Please? Because I know we’d all like our baby brother back.”

  I looked down at Tucker—Tucker, who always had my back; Tucker, who understood what was going on inside of me better than anyone else did, better than myself; Tucker, who would talk some sense into our brothers and get them to stop harassing me. His arms were akimbo, looking like he was ready to catch me if I lost my balance and fell. Idiot. Couldn’t anyone see that I’d been falling this whole time?

  Tucker shrugged a little bit. “Maybe you should call this an intervention,” he said. “It’s time to find your way home, Hunter.”

  “Fuck all of you,” I said, rattled to realize that even Tucker was against me in this. “If you don’t want me here, then I’ll find some other place to be.”

  I planted my crutch firmly on the floor, the broken glass crunching beneath the rubber tip, and hopped toward the door.

  “You’re home,” Chance said, standing straighter, blocking my path. “This is the only place you need to be right now.”

  “Get out of my way,” I hissed. “It’s obvious no one wants me here.”

  “We want you to wake up,” he said, his face emotionless, as if he were conducting a meeting with the loan
officer at the bank and not his flesh and blood. “We want you to get help, Hunter. To get help and help yourself. And to help this place survive.”

  “You just need an extra body on the ranch,” I sneered at him. I hated that he was taller than I was, hated his holier than thou attitude, hated the fact that everyone in this goddamn house had two legs to stand on…except for me.

  “Sure I do,” he said, his voice reasonable. “You used to work this ranch, Hunter, and now you’re back. Why not work it again? You were good at it, and we need you to step up now.”

  “Step up?” I repeated bitterly. “Really? What the fuck do you think I can do for this place? I couldn’t ride a horse now even if I wanted to give it a try. Forget walking anywhere. I can’t do what I used to be able to do. You can just forget about it.”

  I made a move to push past Chance, but he didn’t budge.

  “You lost your leg, Hunter, not your life,” he said. “And as hard as you’re trying now to lose that, too, I’m not going to let you. None of us are.”

  I couldn’t be sure what it was. Maybe Chance’s smugness, or maybe the fact that no one, not even Tucker, leapt to my defense. They were all against me, all of them eager to rain down judgment and ultimatums and bullshit without having a single clue as to what they were talking about. Maybe it was the fact that I didn’t have a defense. I wasn’t contributing to the ranch. That was true. But for Chance to suggest that I get my shit together—like it was something that I could just magically do whenever I “put my mind to it”—showed me just how out of touch with my reality he was. I was broken in a way that was much messier than a leg that looked so cleanly snapped off. The missing leg was maybe the smallest part of me that was unaccounted for.

  Whatever the cause for the blinding influx of wrath, I cocked my fist back and got exactly one clean punch on Chance’s jaw before another brother pounced on me, dragging me away from him, stymieing any other opportunities I had to try and beat some understanding into my oldest brother.